WebRender newsletter #9

Another late newsletter as I was side-tracked by conference travel, followed by a holiday and then a training. My apologies. Brace yourselves though, there has been a lot of good stuff landing in WebRender and Gecko during that time.

Enabling WebRender in Firefox Nightly

The set of prefs to enable WebRender changes every now and then. From now on, I will do recap of the current steps at the top of each newsletter.

In about:config:
– set “gfx.webrender.enabled” to true,
– set “gfx.webrender.blob-images” to true,
– if you are on Linux, set “layers.acceleration.force-enabled” to true.

Note that WebRender can only be enabled in Firefox Nightly.

Notable WebRender changes

Glenn mitigated the performance impact of the new box shadows somewhat, and followed it up with another improvement. This drops the GPU time on bugzilla from ~20ms to ~8ms. There’s still quite a bit of potential for improvement (#1894 among others), but this is probably the most noticeable performance change of the last few days.

Jeff shared fonts between blob images and WebRender. This means we can reuse fonts across different blob images. Not sharing fonts was one of the most noticeable performance problems with blob images. Sharing fonts will also mean that we can break blob images into smaller tiles which will rasterize in parallel.

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9 thoughts on “WebRender newsletter #9”

Those changes made it to 58b1? Or we should wait for 59-ish betas before actually trying to use it daily?

PS: thanks for wiriting this blog, I’ve became more interested in Firefox lately and somehow information is very scarse even on simple topic “what’s coming in next release” not to mention something more in-depth.

WebRender integration is disabled at compile time on all channels except Firefox Nightly at the moment. So you need to grab a nightly build to try it out.
Things are starting to get to a point where adventurous people with the right hardware and drivers can start using it daily (It works well on one of my linux+intel laptops but not so much on another linux+nvidia one).
I wouldn’t advise enabling it yet if not for curiosity’s sake and/or testing and reporting bugs.